Beat E-mail

One man's strategy to manage e-mail... my thoughts:

• Touch messages as few times as possible - obviously once is best.
• In order of preference
• Delete
• Archive
• Delegate
• Act
• Delay (mark for follow-up) 

Yaesu Musen

Always interesting to see what happens to the pieces when companies are split into parts:

"According to Vertex Standard President and Chief Executive Officer Jun Hasegawa, effective January1, 2012, Motorola will keep the Vertex Standard Land-Mobile Division, while the amateur, marine and air-band will be under the Yaesu Musen banner."

Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas!

Gonna be one of those days...

I was already running late when, out of no where, this guy on a Segway pulled out in front of me. To top it off, I ended up with a flat tire, too.

Airplane Filling Station

If you've been in the Knoxville area for any amount of time, you have most likely driven by the Airplane Filling Station (aka the Gas Station Airplane as I always called it). A project is underway to "save the plane" and restore the building. I had no idea that it was so old. Image via McClung.

Word of the Day: Panoply

I was trouble-shooting an Active Directory/DNS problem at work today and was using my google-fu to find a resolution. My search lead me to Troubleshooting DNS - which did not help me solve my problem, but did expand my vocabulary:

"Windows supports a whole panoply of naming services: DNS, WINS, HOSTS, LMHOSTS, and more."

And thus, I present "panoply" - a wide-ranging and impressive array or display.

So Microsoft has an impressive array of naming services. Who knew?!?

Majel

My wife just got an iPhone and we love playing with the Siri app. It has been surprisingly good at voice recognition and the results have been both fun and useful. (Although Siri did have a fit when were asking "what color is Paddington Bear's hat?")

I can only image that competition will make the tools even more useful in the near future. Bonus points to Google for using Majel as the name for their app. It has immediate geek cred and works on several levels.

Word Problems

From a NYTimes e-mail alert:

"Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Tuesday, December 20, 2011 -- 1:19 PM EST
-----
Republicans in House Reject Deal Extending Payroll Tax Cut
House Republicans on Tuesday soundly rejected a bill approved by the Senate that would have extended the payroll tax cut for most Americans beyond the end of the year and allowed millions of unemployed people to continue receiving jobless benefits.

The House vote, which passed 229 to 193, also calls for establishing a negotiating committee so the two chambers can resolve their differences.  Seven Republicans joined Democrats in opposition.

But the Senate has left town for the year, and Democrats say they do not intend to call it back, putting continuation of the tax cut in jeopardy and leaving a shadow over many unemployed Americans as the holidays near.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/us/politics/house-republicans-move-closer-to-rejecting-payroll-tax-cut-deal.html?emc=na"

Emphasis is mine. Talk about your basic FUD job. I know doing word problems confuses people when they do math, but how much of a tax cut do unemployed people need? I say raise taxes on the unemployed. That will fix the deficit problem. Tax them at 10,000%! So the average unemployed person making $0.00 would owe... hmm, carry the 3, multiple then add, hmm... zero dollars!

If I give the NYT the benefit of the doubt, then that sentence is still poorly phrased.

The Democracy Will Cease to Exist

It may be new t-shirt time again. The http://www.brickolore.com/2011/04/t-shirts.html was for the Galt/Taggart 2012 and Taggart Transcontinental. I like wearing those shirts as it isn't too in your face, but if you are in the club, then my views can easily be guessed. This one is a wee bit more direct:

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."

Stability is Speed

I'm really bad about having a bunch of tabs open. Even in Chrome it seems like one tab can cause the others to come to a screeching halt. And having a slow internet connections makes it even worse.

harrymccracken I'm at the point where almost the only thing I care about in a browser is stability when many tabs are open. Everything else is secondary.Sat, Dec 17 21:13:47 from web